Just Run It!

The growth engine of the global economy is no longer through mega-production and huge conglomerates, but rather through the proliferation of smaller enterprises. These smaller businesses often struggle. In America alone, tens of thousands of businesses crop up each year. Unfortunately, few will succeed, though not due to a lack of ingenuity, initiative, or even capital. Why, then? Because so few of the would-be drivers of the new economy know how to convert their dreams, their ideas, their courage, and their initiatives into successful enterprises. According to Dick Cross, author of Just Run It!: Running an Exceptional Business Is Easier Than You Think, most business owners lack not just the fundamentals, the nuts and bolts of operating a business effectively day in and day out, but the bigger picture of how to achieve business success. This shortcoming is pervasive: it handicaps most new businesses from the start and it prevents the lion's share of existing ones from ever becoming significant.

After taking dozens of mainstream companies from underperforming to high performance, Cross observed a pattern, out of which he devised a formula for success. Using his Just Run It! framework, he is now teaching small and medium-sized enterprises how to understand their mainstream businesses on "the back of an envelope" and to achieve the next level of success. The book showcases a Vision-Strategy-Execution exercise to help business owners crystallize their primary business advantage and then focus efforts to maximize performance around it. Financial reporting, management and leadership, teamwork, communicationsall skills needed to run a "one business" business are covered in detail. In closing, Cross makes the case that for "those who can't adjust their thinking to new realities, the decline in America's global standing as an industrial power is a death knell. For those who can, it's the reveille of opportunity."